[Pkg-exim4-users] exim4 not starting by default in lenny

Marc Haber mh+pkg-exim4-users at zugschlus.de
Wed Mar 17 14:01:16 UTC 2010


On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 08:43:11PM +0100, Lukas Baxa wrote:
> I installed the exim4 package under debian lenny, but the daemon doesn't
> start. In /var/log/mail.err, I can find following:
>
> Mar  15 21:30:07 ... exim[11948]: 2010-03-15 21:30:07 exim 4.69 daemon  
> started: pid=11948, -q30m, listening for SMTP on [127.0.0.1]:25
> Mar  15 21:30:07 ... exim[11948]: 2010-03-15 21:30:07 Cannot open main  
> log file "/var/log/exim4/mainlog": Permission denied: euid=102 egid=107
> Mar  15 21:30:07 ... exim[11948]: exim: could not open panic log -  
> aborting: see message(s) above
>
> So I checked the access to /var/log/exim4/mainlog and I found that
> /var/log is not accessible for the Debian-exim user (in fact to anyone
> who isn't root or isn't a member of the root group).
>
> > ls -ld /var/log
> drwxr-x--- 7 root root 3072 Mar 16 20:25 /var/log/
>
> This problem can be solved by setting the permissions to 755 to  
> /var/log, but I suppose the access is prohibited because of security
> reasons. So I changed the ownership of var log to root:adm
>
> > chown root:adm /var/log
>
> and added the user Debian-exim to the adm group:
>
> > usermod -G adm Debian-exim

Bad Idea.

I don't know what went wrong on your system, this is how the
permissions are supposed to look like:

drwxr-xr-x 47 root        root  32K 17. Mär 07:39 /var/log/
drwxr-s---  2 Debian-exim adm  4,0K 13. Mär 13:20 /var/log/exim4/
-rw-r-----  1 Debian-exim adm  3,9M 17. Mär 14:37 /var/log/exim4/mainlog
-rw-r-----  1 Debian-exim adm     0 17. Mär 08:34 /var/log/exim4/paniclog

exim works fine that way.

> Shouldn't the default configuration of exim4 be such so that this server
> starts under lenny after it is configured by running dpkg-reconfigure  
> exim4-config

It is, and exim works fine. In all cases I know. There have been rare
reports of botched up permissions after installation, but I am much
less than convinced that this is caused by the exim package.

Greetings
Marc

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